Update On Jailbreak For iOS 7, 6.1.4/6.1.3

iOS 7 launched last week has been immediately adopted on a mass scale with more than 200 million devices estimated to be already running the said firmware.

We’ve been tracking the progress of the upcoming untethered jailbreak with keen interest over the last few weeks. The people behind the project have taken it from almost nothing to actually demonstrating the untether in operation by releasing a video. Yes, the jailbreak is buggy, but progress is indeed progress and those loyal to iOS 6 can be thankful for that. Today, iH8sn0w has taken the opportunity to shed some additional light on the iOS 7, 6.1.3/6.1.4 A5+ jailbreak status.

iOS 6.1.4/6.1.3 Jailbreak

The blog post begins by confirming that Apple has now officially closed the ability for users to downgrade back to iOS 6.1.x from iOS 7. Although iOS 7 has been extremely popular with users, it’s more than likely that hardcore jailbreak lovers would have stayed on their iOS 6 installations to maintain that safety net. The good news is that it has been confirmed that everything that is required for the iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 untethered jailbreak on A5+ devices is in place. The problem, and current focal point, is fixing internal bugs that simply cannot be shipped with a public jailbreak. This was also confirmed by Winocm today, who is apparently the main guy behind this jailbreak:

The status of the jailbreak is pretty much: it needs work but its almost there. (For a very small subset of devices.)

— winocm (@winocm) September 23, 2013

Current issues being faced by the team involve native apps on the device managing to delete themselves as well as problems surrounding the activation of iMessage and FaceTime. The informative post also tackles the age old question of why bother burning these exploits on a minor install base of iOS 6.1.4/6.1.3 when they could be used to provide liberation on a mass scale on iOS 7? The simple answer to that is the exploits being used in this jailbreak will not work on iOS 7.

iOS 7 Jailbreak

Finally, a little attention is also paid to iOS 7 and any potential jailbreak.

We know that the Evad3rs team is currently exploring iOS 7 exploits, but the fact remains that Cydia, MobileSubstrate and WinterBoard are all broken on the latest firmware so unfortunately a jailbreak is a mile off.

There is also some focus paid to Apple’s latest version of iTunes that was recently released with iOS 7. Without going into too much information regarding the iTunes restore process and how it communicates with Apple’s authentication servers, it’s a lot simpler to just say that iTunes 11.1 entirely kills custom firmware restores on iOS 7 for A4 and below devices. iH8sn0w is currently working on a fix that can be implemented into future version of Sn0wbreeze and iFaith.

For all you iOS 6.1.x users waiting patiently out there, a jailbreak is close to completion and definitely coming, but there is no ETA on arrival yet.